I too am a bit surprised. I could never address a problem of color perception without cycling through the relevant HSL values.

As a designer, colour models like RGB, Lab, CMTK and hex are of instruments of application. All well and good, but if you want a colour model that is suitable for thinking about colors with, then HSL (or HSV) is the only option.

As an exercise, I get my students to define the difference between color pairs using HSL. Even high school students can do it. Try that with RGB!